Spiritual Enlightenment Through Politics

Only One World By Sylvia Mayuga (philstar.com) Updated November 08, 2009 12:00 AM

Ah, yes. The ‘80s was indeed quite a decade, as global media networks converging around the vanished Berlin Wall now remind us daily. This nostalgic mood climaxes on 11-11-09, Wednesday, the 20th anniversary of its fall after 40 years of paranoia between the warring “capitalist and communist blocs”. I’m not immune. It was against the odds that my parents had me in World War II. Progressively more powerful missiles bristled over our teens in the “mutually assured destruction” of a nuclear arms race.

And that Berlin Wall was the main symbol of the Iron Curtain dividing postwar Europe with what seemed to be finality, with capitalist and communist power dividing the world in the minds of our generation, in mistrust that could not grant the other’s humanity. Cold War threatening our lives with our freedom became the premise of our world. Its mantra was: Count your blessings. This is not shooting war, not yet, at least. You kids cannot begin to imagine what that’s like.

True, but only partially – the rest of it was that we did know war. Early childhood brought dreams of planes droning overhead and a sudden feeling of panic, likely from a memory in my mother’s womb.

It was the very air we breathed from grade school to college and beyond. Even the nuns in our convent school seemed to forget “Love one another” when they updated WW II with images of Soviet tanks and communists stomping on crucifixes. No one ever told us in school that the Soviets, too, fought the Nazis with the Allied Powers on our side.

And so, in a divided world, we imbibed convent school versions of English, Tagalog, Spanish, History, Math, Physics, Literature, Philosophy, Psychology and Theology for a Bachelor of Arts. Unless one fancied becoming a total “career girl,” marriage was understood as the destiny of normal females not “Brides of Christ.” Non-religious unmarried females were “old maids,” a vaguely disreputable state as we heard it.

With that worldview blending classroom verities, cultural lore and social pressure, we left convent school for “the real world.” Girls with a mind postponed marriage for early careers and further studies. There were quite a few in my college batch. “Commencement,” the beginning, led to that world turning out too real for our hothouse training sub species aeternitatis, in the light of eternity, unless we had already escaped into textbook marriage with a college boy right after, some before graduation. Those who didn’t marry early found adulthood to require ever-finer understanding of ambivalence with gray shades of good and evil.

Soon after the doors of the “school of hard knocks” welcomed our twenties, we were facing exploding Molotov cocktails in Manila, with trails of splintered glass from anti-Marcos student demonstrations and then the founding of a youthful Communist Party of the Philippines in ’69. Before we knew it, martial law was declared, marking us for life as we turned 30 in Dekada Setenta . It soon became a novel, in Tagalog, if you please.

It was a new hothouse – if you were pretty in pink in the 50s, now you were spouting Tagalog with the Left, Left-influenced or at least a sympathizer to love your country. Intense pressure of all kinds turned all too many in my generation into underground shadows, escapists and/or druggies, sometimes dead and/or vanished without a trace. I tell this tale not to dwell in unspeakable tragedies that fortified you if you survived them.

That’s a cliché but I assure you, it was as real as the world could get. It’s time to draw the larger canvas of an individual life traveling far to arrive at the truth of its time leading to the Berlin Wall. Utter fidelity to truth was required of a writer. I refused to write a single line for the crony press under Presidential Decree 1081, no matter my close to a decade of regular newspaper jobs, freelancing and a stint as ABS-CBN news editor pre-martial law.

Yet, loss of press freedom did not weigh as heavily on me as a dear first cousin’s decade of self-exile in Red China, on pain of arrest if he came home from a sneak visit that began just before martial law. Heaviest was the death of a poet whose spirit I loved beyond his words, announced to my shock one morning by Kate Webb, the Vietnam War correspondent just released by the Vietcong, asking me to confirm if “Eman Lacaba was killed in Mindanao”.

No! Eman had opened the undercurrent of Banahaw in Philippine history to me; he taught me the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching that became my lifeline in our most uncertain world. After he went underground, he would visit us in Manila, demolishing the years with his new crazy idea of turning banana stalk celluloid to film stock to cut our film-loving people’s import dependence. With such tragicomic contrasts, how to cope with gagging myself from the crony press in protest, letting the years pass in self-exile for our generation in one form or another?

Modus vivendi as the ‘’70s became the ‘80s was to be IN the Philippines in martial law but not OF it.

Survivors felt guilty when another generous brilliant one of us gave life or freedom in prison unto torture so that our people might have a chance to live. Ideology was the least of that mortal commitment. They were no more killers than we were. Most just wanted to do something, anything to break an impasse that weighed like leaden armor on our generation’s soul. Those who didn’t think the CPP-NDF-NPA was an answer lived in constant self-questioning: Were we plain cowards for not taking up arms to exterminate the ruling class with Ed Jopson, Lori Barros, Gary Grey?

On her first holiday in Manila since migrating to the US in the ‘60s, my college chum Loida Nicolas-Lewis remarked, “Martial law’s been good for Filipinos. It’s made them more reflective. They’ve developed an inner life.” I loved Loida and we did learn meditation and t’ai chi for balance but that seemed insensitive in mid-martial law. How could she know how much we suffered? Succeeding events would prove her right, however.

As soon as martial law’s “paper lifting” by an over-confident Marcos regime allied to the bluster of an equally self-confident Reagan, there was a palpable flutter of wings. It began in imagination: “What if we took advantage of this tiny chink of light after ten of the darkest years in our lifetime?” My bold colleague in Sunburst magazine, Arlene Babst, didn’t hesitate. She took on a column in the Bulletin, flagship of the crony press. Soon she was urging me to join her as the second columnist at the invitation of “Hans,” i.e. Menzi, the publisher.

“You’re kidding,” I said. She kept at it, showing me towers of mail from readers welcoming a voice apparently free of censorship after a decade of cartoon news. “They’re hungry; help me deal with this,” she said. On the fourth month of inveigling, I hesitantly relented, “I’ll try it but only if I can get out anytime.” Soon after the first columns, the power of the press hit me in the eye.

The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas invited me to go behind the Iron Curtain for the first time, on the occasion of a “Global Assembly for Peace & Life” in Prague, Czechoslovakia in the “Eastern Bloc.” Communists for peace and life? But they were the enemy! It was the antipode New York, spoiled queen of the capitalist system, on a Fulbright scholarship to Columbia journalism school in the liberation ‘60s.

But one does not say ‘no’ to discovery with a fun delegation of Pinoys. My first trip to Moscow in 1982 transpired without a visa stamped on my passport, only a detachable slip of paper permitting entry. No one spoke English in a creaking Aeroflot plane in Artic cold that could not be regulated. Our Russian stewardess had the hint of a mustache. The chicken curry was a strange unpalatable green.

To make a long story short, the 80s had begun its series of revelations on that mysterious other half of the world “behind the Iron Curtain”. I searched for what I could find to prepare me – there wasn’t much that wasn’t boring propaganda on either side. I did find a Filipino scholar diplomat who’d studied Soviet history in situ, but his scholarly text peppered with Winston Churchill could not answer my deeper questions.

Imagine my shock at discovering a Greek communist lady in a sable spring coat in assembly at the white marble Palace Kultury, huge spring violets in courtyard flower boxes. Adding a frisson to radical chic was Yasser Arafat dropping in with the recent global horror story of Shabra and Shatila.

The assembly’s purpose sounded increasingly reasonable to me – global disarmament after decades of pouring national treasure into weapons ever more lethal in self-defense as costly, if not more so than war. Of course it was propaganda, how could it not be, with Soviet generals and scientists produced like clockwork, attesting to the world behind the Iron Curtain united in a call for peace. In the end, not the Internationale rose to the rafters but a full orchestra and chorus with Beethoven’s “ Ode to Joy,” our linked communist and capitalist hands raised in hope for peace, peace at last.

My last look at the otherworldly beauty of medieval Praha came with a vow to return to its golden-domed Museum of Bohemia and the royal seal with the golden lion of spiritual enlightenment at the gates of the Czech Palace on a hill with an Alchemists’ Lane at its foot. We flew back to Moscow to meet the Soviet Peace Committee headed by stocky Yuri Drozdov with a deep, deep voice speaking perfect English. Our delegation of activists asked who exactly the Soviet Peace Committee was.

He said they were Soviet citizens in a nationwide NGO, mostly non-Party members - doctors, nurses, housewives, students, government workers as themselves, the whole gamut of “civil society,” as it soon would be called worldwide. They had raised citizen donations for this conference that took us behind the Iron Curtain. Common ground expanded over lovely samovars of tea in their office up a nondescript Stalin-era building, one of many in Moscow’s super macho landscape.

Then into the Tretyakov Gallery with its stupendous collection of European art (Yes, Russia is part of Europe, they said.) dating back to the czars, iconic St. Basil’s Church with its striped onion dome, Lenin’s tomb and museum, into the Kremlin palace with its dazzling czarina chandeliers over thick red carpets, and a leisurely stroll through Red Square.